FoodBanter.com - Sweetening chocolate

at Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:59:47 GMT in <1118091587.337940.219840
@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, (arne97) wrote :

> I have a friend who cannot eat soy or corn.
>
> Bakers makes an unsweetened cooking chocolate with nothing except
>chocolate and cocoa.

How does your friend's dietary restrictions interfere with eating chocolate
from a sweetening POV? Sugar is derived neither from soy nor corn.

If OTOH you are worried about soy lecithin, this is not a big problem
because there are manufacturers who don't use it. See below.

Baker's, meanwhile, is so utterly worthless as chocolate that it should
*NEVER* be used IMHO under any circumstances for any application. Truly
bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. More on *that* below, too.
>
> I'd like to sweeten this and use it for coating .

A bad idea. See below on that.

> What is the best method to add sugar to the chocolate, avoiding the
>graininess and also staying away from the cornstarch in powdered sugar?

A better method altogether is to buy a chocolate that doesn't use soy
lecithin. Michel Cluizel is the exemplar in this regard. Superb chocolate,
too, IMHO the best chocolatier in the world. Domori also makes chocolate
without soy lecithin, at least in the "Chateau" and "Cru" lines. How sweet
does this friend like his chocolate, BTW?

It's also worth noting that both of these manufacturers make unsweetened
chocolate that are incomparably better than Baker's brand. Also betterthan
Baker's, by far, in unsweetened, are Ghirardelli, Guittard, and Callebaut -
somewhat more common brands.

If for the purposes of experimentation rather than simply to achieve soy-
lecithin-free chocolate you were to try to sweeten an unsweetened
chocolate, you would have a very difficult time of it indeed. Even powdered
sugar is far too coarse to produce a smooth texture, so that, although it's
possible to get cornstarch-free powdered sugar, if you were to add this to
unsweetened chocolate you would still end up with a gritty result.

The best way to do this, as an approach, is to make a sugar syrup (just
dissolve some sugar in water), cook it to the hard-crack point, then
quickly stir it into melted chocolate. It requires precise timing and you
must stir quickly and continuously in order for this to work at all. You
might still end up with some sugar lumps unless your temperatures are
perfect and your stirring uniform.

Other than that, you'd have to set up some sort of home conching rig - for
example setting a bunch of ceramic pie weights in a stand mixer, putting
the melted chocolate and the sugar (preferably already cornstarch-free
powdered sugar) in, turning it on, and leaving it to whirl for about 2 or 3
days.

Hopefully you see from this that DIY chocolate isn't a good idea for
somebody who's looking mostly to get a usable end product. It's fun and
educational if you want to appreciate the process of making chocolate, but
you have to approach it with that goal in mind because without obsessive
persistence you wouldn't get chocolate that was even remotely decent and
it's a waste of time anyway when there are chocolate manufacturers
supplying chocolate to meet just about every conceivable need or dietary
restriction.
--
Alex Rast

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